Outside, the rain had started to come down. Michael pulled up the collar on his trench coat and got back in his car. He had a very long drive ahead of him. The visit to his mother was not the only reason he had driven south. He was now headed to southwest Virginia. To Fort Jackson. To see Rufus Harms. For a moment, he debated whether to stop and see his brother. John had not returned his phone call, which was no surprise. But the journey he was about to undertake had some personal risk to it, and Michael wouldn’t have minded having his brother’s advice and perhaps presence. But then he shook his head. John Fiske was a very busy attorney and he didn’t have time to run around the state chasing wild theories of his younger brother’s. He would just have to deal with it alone.
* * *
As she often did, Elizabeth Knight rose early, did some stretching exercises on the floor and then ran on the treadmill in the spare bedroom of her and her husband Senator Jordan Knight’s Watergate apartment. She showered, dressed, fixed some coffee and toast and looked over some bench memos in preparation for oral argument next week. Since it was Friday, the justices would spend part of the day in conference, where they would vote on cases they had already heard. Ramsey ran the conferences on a tight schedule. To her disappointment, there was little debate at these meetings. Ramsey would summarize the salient points of each case, cast his vote orally, and wait while the other justices did the same. If Ramsey was in the majority, which he usually was, he assigned the opinion. If he wasn’t, the most senior associate justice in the majority, usually Murphy — ideological opposites, he and Ramsey rarely if ever voted the same way — would assign the opinion.
As Knight finished her coffee, she thought back over her first three years on the Court. It had been a whirlwind, really. Because of her gender, she was automatically seen as not only a champion of women’s rights but also of causes that many women traditionally supported. People never considered this stereotyping, although it was a blatant form of it, Knight knew. She was a judge, not a politician. She had to look at each case separately, just as she had done as a trial court judge. And yet, even she had to own up to the fact that the Supreme Court was different. The impact of its decisions was so far-reaching that the justices were forced to go beyond the four corners of each case and look at the effect of the decision on everyone else. That had been one of the hardest things for her to do.
She looked around the luxurious apartment. She and her husband had a good life together. They were routinely touted as the capital’s number one power couple. And in a way they were. She carried that mantle as well as she could, even as she combated the isolation that each justice had to endure. When you went on the Court, friends stopped calling, people treated you differently, were careful, guarded in what they said around you. Knight had always been gregarious, outgoing. Now she felt much less so. She clung to her husband’s professional life as a way to lessen the impact of this abrupt change. Sometimes she felt like a nun with eight monks as her lifelong companions.
As if in answer to her thoughts, Jordan Knight, still dressed in his pajamas, came up behind her and gave her a hug. “You know, there’s no rule that says you have to start every day at the crack of dawn. Snuggling in bed is good for the soul,” he said.
She kissed his hand and turned to give him a hug back.
“I don’t recall you being a late sleeper either, Senator.”
“We should both make a concerted effort to do it, I think. Who knows what it could lead to? I’ve heard sex is the best defense against aging.”
Jordan Knight was tall and heavily built, with thinning gray hair and a tanned face scored with lines. In the inequitable way of the world regarding the physical appearances of men and women, he would be considered handsome even with the wrinkles and the extra pounds. He cut quite a figure on the pages of the Post and local magazines, and on national TV shows where even the most experienced political pundits were often overwhelmed by his wit, experience and intelligence.